One thing I dislike about 5E is the blurring between these two magic types. There used to be a certain amount of Niche Protection. There was a clear way arcane and divine powers were not only used but gained.
Divine Magic came from the Gods or Godlike forces and you had to have faith to use it.. Arcane magic came from the universe itself and you learned how to use it.
Now it's all mixed up. Some arcane users also can just cast divine magic spells exactly like arcane magic spells and some Divine Casters can just cast arcane magic spells the exact same way as Divine spells.
At the same time many of the casters are exactly like it was before. There is no longer any internal D&D world reasoning for anything. It's just all because. Sorcerers can just resurrect and heal the same as clerics and some clerics are throw around fireballs left and right.
If a bard casts a healing spell with no faith and no other power behind it..why can't a Wizard?
First off, 2E was the only edition where bards
couldn't cast healing spells (and even then they could fake it sometimes), so I'm not sure what you're complaining about at this late date.
But to dig deeper, there is officially no such thing as "arcane magic" and "divine magic" in 5E. It doesn't help to look at
cure wounds and think, "That's a divine spell, so when the bard, an arcane caster, casts it, they're casting divine magic!" That's just not true. It's a bard spell, a cleric spell, a druid spell, a paladin spell, and a ranger spell, but those classes don't fall under a common "divine" umbrella. You may lament the loss, but really, look at what you had to do to define "divine magic" in your own words: "Gods
or Godlike forces". That's kind of a shoehorn, isn't it? The natural forces that druids and rangers draw from are very different than the gods that clerics draw from. 4E made this explicit by labeling it the "primal" power source; 5E is content just to let every class stand as its own implicit source.
So if you're, say, a sorcerer, you can do the things on the sorcerer spell list because those are the things that sorcerous magic -- not arcane or divine magic,
sorcerous magic -- is good at. The sorcerer spell list has no intrinsic relation to the wizard spell list because sorcerous magic is not the same thing as wizardly magic. Which is really obvious from the flavor of the classes; frankly it's astounding that in 3E sorcerers
did share the wizard list.
To add to your example, it makes no sense that wizards not only cant use arcane resurgence (or whatever its called) on anything above a 6th level slot, but also can onoy cast 1 7th, 1 8th, and 1 9th level spell slot per day.
If you take a second look, you will notice that there is a structural difference in 5E between spells of 5th level or lower -- what we might call "low magic" -- and spells of 6th level or higher -- what we might call "high magic". You seem to be complaining about the wizard class specifically, but this is a consistent pattern across all the classes: you see the same 5th-level limit again and again. Half-casters, of course, max out at 5th. The Land druid has functionally the same feature as Arcane Recovery. The sorcerer can't create slots above 5th with spell points. Clerics only get domain spells up to 5th. And most blatantly of all, the warlock's entire spellcasting system reconfigures for spells above 5th. When a class stops advancing its regular magical abilities and starts gaining a special new power called "Mystic Arcana", do you think maybe the game is trying to tell you something about how powerful magic works?
They say "derrr, no one is playing above level 15, must be peolle just dont like longer campaigns ever. EVER!"...i wonder, could it have something to do with this weird tendancy to cut classes off below the knees later in levels (moreso with wizard than most) and that people dont find that fun?
Only if this "weird tendency" also occurred in the editions from which they got the polling data that they used to make the design decisions for 5E.
